Monthly Archive:: January 2012

"Google's efforts to improve Internet efficiency through the development of the SPDY (pronounced 'speedy') protocol got a major boost today when the chairman of the HTTP Working Group (HTTPbis), Mark Nottingham, called for it to be included in the HTTP 2.0 standard. SPDY is a protocol that's already used to a certain degree online; formal incorporation into the next-generation standard would improve its chances of being generally adopted."

InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp takes an in-depth look at six Chromium-based spinoffs that bring privacy, security, social networking, and other interesting twists to Google's Chrome browser. 'When is it worth ditching Chrome for a Chromium-based remix? Some of the spinoffs are little better than novelties. Some have good ideas implemented in an iffy way. But a few point toward some genuinely new directions for both Chrome and other browsers.'

As much as I dislike Unity, I commend the Ubuntu team and Shuttleworth for having the guts to try to innovate and bring the desktop forward (pretty much the exact same can be said of KDE4 and GNOME3). Shuttleworth has just announced yet another significant change for Ubuntu, and it's all about replacing the menu with a search interface dubbed the HUD.

Apple reported its quarterly results, and thanks to the iPhone 4S and the iPad, Apple is putting out bizarre figures - 37 million iPhones, 15.5 million iPads. "The Company sold 37.04 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 128 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.43 million iPads during the quarter, a 111 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 5.2 million Macs during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.4 million iPods, a 21 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter." Is this the end of Android's dominance, or just a single uberquarter due to the new iPhone?

"Today Mozilla and the Rust community are releasing version 0.1 of the Rust compiler and associated tools. Rust is a strongly-typed systems programming language with a focus on memory safety and concurrency. This is the initial release of the compiler after a multi-year development cycle focusing on self-hosting, implementation of major features, and solidifying the syntax. Version 0.1 should be considered an alpha release, suitable for early adopters and language enthusiasts. It's nifty, but it will still eat your laundry."

VirtualBSD 9.0 is a desktop-ready FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE built around the XFCE Desktop Environment for good aesthetics and usability, and is distributed as a VMware appliance (that can also be made to work with VirtualBox) so even non techies can be up and running in minutes. The most common applications, plugins and multimedia codecs are ready since the first boot.

"The CPU design firm Venray Technology announced a new product design this week that it claims can deliver enormous performance benefits by combining CPU and DRAM on to a single piece of silicon. We spent some time earlier this fall discussing the new TOMI (Thread Optimized Multiprocessor) with company CTO Russell Fish, but while the idea is interesting; its presentation is marred by crazy conceptualizing and deeply suspect analytics."

That's what you get for not delivering. As had been anticipated for a while now, the two co-CEOs of Research In Motion, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, will step down from their posts. Chief operating officer Thorsten Heins will take over the role of CEO, while the two former co-CEOs will move to other functions within the company.

"This week, tons of websites are reporting that Apple is catching up with Android when it comes to U.S. smartphone market share. The reports are based on some new data from Nielsen, a metrics company that measures smartphone use. The only problem: people are completely misinterpreting the data." Numbers are fickle beings.

"Windows and Office: they've been Microsoft's two biggest cash cows since... Forever. But in Microsoft's second fiscal 2012 quarter ending December 31, 2011, Windows/Windows Live dropped to No. 3, behind the Microsoft Business Division (home of Office) and Server and Tools."

Apple's education event just ended, and just as Ars Technica said, Apple announced better support for textbooks, as well as a textbook authoring tool. The textbook authoring tool is heavily inspired by Keynote and Pages, and hence, I already know it's going to be top-notch and very pleasant to use. In addition, the company also repositioned iTunes U as a Blackboard competitor. As great as all these new tools are, several large red flags went up in my mind: I remember what it was like being the only student who didn't use Windows. Update: "Any e-textbook author that wants access to the iPad-toting masses must make his or her work an exclusive to iBooks 2."

Custom ROMs on mobile devices have been a staple-mate of the mobile industry since the Windows Mobile PocketPC CE Phone Edition Whatever days. Android took over here, with a lively custom ROM scene, allowing you to tailor your device to your own needs - including updates to operating system versions your device maker of carrier doesn't allow. Custom iOS ROMs, on the other hand, are pretty damn rare, so it's interesting to see a custom iOS ROM that brings several iOS 5 features to devices that can't actually run iOS 5. Welcome to Whited00r.

Well, well, well, well. Just like I, and many others with me, have said: SOPA is most certainly not dead. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith has just pushed out a press release stating that the House debate on SOPA will continue in February, 'unshelving' SOPA only a few days after it was supposedly shelved.

Fascinating. After the whole Mocality story, we were greeted by another story of Google misconduct. This time, it's OpenStreetMap, which claims that users connecting from the same Google IP addresses in India as in the Mocality incident are vandalising OpenStreetMap data. Google has confirmed to ReadWriteWeb that two contractors acting on their own behalf while on the Google network were responsible. Another, less serious instance of Google misconduct, perhaps, but OpenStreetMap's handling of this issue does smell fishy.